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Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West
Here is an obligatory link to a review of the MoMA exhibit called 'Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West. I must admit it annoyed me. The following observation is useful:
Ms. Respini points out in her catalog essay that the time during which white European civilization expanded into and eventually occupied North America coincides with the invention and development of photography. This is not just incidental. The idea of the West would be informed by machine-made images.
That the medium itself can be used both for empirical documentation and visionary expression nicely mirrors the exhibition’s subject: the American West is real, but it is also a set of fantasies.
However, I am otherwise annoyed by both the review and the reviewer whose tone smacks of a kind of cultural condescension I have come to abhor, especially in his elevation of the past over the present. What he fails to recognize is that cultural fantasies don't just apply to the American West, they also apply to the past. Contemporary images are less appealing to him, not just because of what they portray, but because of the inability to attach the romance of distance (in terms of time, not just geography) to them.
What the West has been struggling to deal with (especially in the non-coastal, arid, portions of the country) is the failure of the fantasy, (which was always just that) or the continued hard-scrabble existence in much of this place, in opposition to the romance of the bootstrap. The tension between opportunism and optimism. The reviewer hits the nail on the head when he observes, "People in one section exemplify a pioneering spirit; elsewhere we encounter portraits of wasted human potential," but loses it later when he calls the subjects in contemporary portraits "ridiculous" or "of uncertain moral fiber":
Such photographs [contemporary portraits] may evoke the West as a place of unprecedented freedom for individual expression and experimental behavior. But the people they portray look pathetic, not heroic. There are no positive role models here.
I hadn't realized that the role of the West was to provide role models. Or that the role of photographers was to capture them. Not to mention the sticky layer of moral sentimentality this reviewer seems to have laid over the images of the past. Obviously, I have not seen the show, so goodness knows what the curator set out for the viewer to see. But I can't help but feel that this reviewer falls for the same myth this show sets out to explore.
For some reason, I couldn't help but think of images in an article about the role of the Southern Ute and the energy boom that ran last year in this paper. See the Ute in a hard hat next to an oil well. Neither pathetic, ridiculous, nor of 'uncertain moral fiber,' but certainly caught in the crossroads of the shifting and complex realities of living in the West today.
Ms. Respini points out in her catalog essay that the time during which white European civilization expanded into and eventually occupied North America coincides with the invention and development of photography. This is not just incidental. The idea of the West would be informed by machine-made images.
That the medium itself can be used both for empirical documentation and visionary expression nicely mirrors the exhibition’s subject: the American West is real, but it is also a set of fantasies.
However, I am otherwise annoyed by both the review and the reviewer whose tone smacks of a kind of cultural condescension I have come to abhor, especially in his elevation of the past over the present. What he fails to recognize is that cultural fantasies don't just apply to the American West, they also apply to the past. Contemporary images are less appealing to him, not just because of what they portray, but because of the inability to attach the romance of distance (in terms of time, not just geography) to them.
What the West has been struggling to deal with (especially in the non-coastal, arid, portions of the country) is the failure of the fantasy, (which was always just that) or the continued hard-scrabble existence in much of this place, in opposition to the romance of the bootstrap. The tension between opportunism and optimism. The reviewer hits the nail on the head when he observes, "People in one section exemplify a pioneering spirit; elsewhere we encounter portraits of wasted human potential," but loses it later when he calls the subjects in contemporary portraits "ridiculous" or "of uncertain moral fiber":
Such photographs [contemporary portraits] may evoke the West as a place of unprecedented freedom for individual expression and experimental behavior. But the people they portray look pathetic, not heroic. There are no positive role models here.
I hadn't realized that the role of the West was to provide role models. Or that the role of photographers was to capture them. Not to mention the sticky layer of moral sentimentality this reviewer seems to have laid over the images of the past. Obviously, I have not seen the show, so goodness knows what the curator set out for the viewer to see. But I can't help but feel that this reviewer falls for the same myth this show sets out to explore.
For some reason, I couldn't help but think of images in an article about the role of the Southern Ute and the energy boom that ran last year in this paper. See the Ute in a hard hat next to an oil well. Neither pathetic, ridiculous, nor of 'uncertain moral fiber,' but certainly caught in the crossroads of the shifting and complex realities of living in the West today.